1 . A Heroic Driver

Larry works with Transport Drivers,   Inc.   One morning in 2009, Larry was ______along 165 north after delivering to one of his _______. Suddenly, he saw a car with its bright lights on. _______ he got closer, he found ____ vehicle upside down on the road. One more look and he noticed _______ shooting out from under the _______ vehicle. Larry pulled over, set the brake and _______the fire extinguisher (灭火器). Two good bursts from the extinguisher and the fire was put out.

The man who had his bright lights on _______ and told Larry he had _______ an emergency call. They ________ heard a woman’s voice coming from the wrecked (毁坏的) vehicle. ________the vehicle, they saw that a woman was trying to get out of the broken window. They told her to stay ________ until the emergency personnel arrived, ________ she thought the car was going to ________. Larry told her that he had already put out the fire and she should not move ________ she injured her neck.

Once fire and emergency people arrived, Larry and the other man ________ and let them go to work. Then, Larry asked the ________ if he was needed or ________ to go. They let him and the other man go.

One thing is ________—Larry went above and beyond the call of duty by getting so close to the burning vehicle! His ________ most likely saved the woman’s life.

A couple，whom we shall call John and Mary, had a nice home and two lovely children. One day, John and Mary decided to go on a trip to another city, so they found a kind woman to look after the children and left.

Several days later, they returned home a little earlier than they had planned. As they drove back to their hometown, John and Mary noticed smoke and went to see what it was. They found a house was on fire.“Oh,well, it isn't our house. Let's go home,”Mary said.

But John drove closer and screamed in surprise，“That's Jordan's home. He works in a factory. He wouldn’t be off work yet. Maybe there is something we can do to help.”

“It has nothing to do with us,”cried Mary. “You have your good clothes on,so let's not get any closer.”

John didn't listen to Mary. He drove up and stopped. They were both shocked to see the whole house was on fire. A woman was crying in the yard, “The children! Get the children!”

John seized her by the shoulder and shouted to her, “Don't cry! Tell me where the children are!” “In the basement(地下室)，”cried the woman,“down the hall and to the left.”

John used water to get his clothes wet and put a wet towel on his head before rushing to the basement. The house was full of smoke and fire, and it was very difficult for him to find the children. But he made it. He held one under each arm. As he left，he could hear some more crying. He took the two kids out of the house and into the fresh air，and then asked the women how many more children were still down there.

Thewoman told him there were two more.

As he took them out,he felt something strangely familiar about the little bodies.

3 . I was recently involved in a bad traffic accident. I was knocked unconscious by the impact so I don’t __ anything about the accident. My first memory is being given oxygen as the doctors and nurses tried to ____ me back to life.

As I lay in the emergency room, I found myself ____ my life and thanking God that I was still __. The good news is that nobody else was __.

Since that day, the physical recovery has been __ but not as tough as the emotional recovery. I've learned a lot about myself and about what really ____ in this world. Things that are really important are not“things”. I’m not invincible(无敌的)and I cannot ____ everything that happens in my life. I need to be better at ____ the things that come into my way that I didn’t plan for. As someone who was always in a ____，it taught me to slow down a little. I have learned to live each day honestly and ____.

___ I continue to heal physically and emotionally，I have a different opinion on ____ . When tragedy strikes，you can either let it ____ your spirit，or use it as an opportunity to grow. I have chosen to ____ from it.

“It’s not looking too good, darling, I think you’d better pack a few things and go to your mother’s place. And you’d better take Rosie and Monty with you.”

Putting down the phone, Sara sighed. Tomorrow was her husband Tony’s birthday. She had planned to cook him a nice meal and then surprise him with the new mountain bike she’d bought for him. If she went to her mother’s house, Tony wouldn’t get his present for days.

However, her mother’s house was the best place to be right now. Being on higher land, it would be safe from the floods. It had been raining heavily for almost two weeks and the river near Sara and Tony’s house was rising higher and higher all the time. Tony and others from the village had spent the last two days putting sandbags along the side of the river to stop it from overflowing. Now they feared that their hard work had been useless and soon the whole valley would be flooded.

Sara dressed baby James in warm clothes and collected the things she would need for him over the next few days. She put the lead on the dog and went in search of Monty, the cat. It took her a long time, but eventually she found him safe and warm under the covers on her bed. She placed him in his cat basket and took him into the kitchen where James and the dog, Rosie, were waiting.

Just as she was reaching for the car keys, Sarah heard a sound like the noise bath water makes when you pull out the plug. She looked at the backdoor, water was flowing in underneath. Turning around, she saw dirty brown water fountaining out of the drain and filling the sink. Realizing that they were trapped by the flood and it became impossible for her to drive out, quickly she put James into her backpack and pulled onto her back. Calling to Rosie, she picked up the cat basket and ran to the front of the house and out into the front garden, where the car was parked.

The water was already up to her knees, and Rosie was swimming beside her.

Sara, together with James, Rosie and Monty, was hungry and frightened on the roof of the house when a boat appeared in the distance.

Rescue in a Bottle

Curtis Whitson had rafted (v.乘筏) down the Arroyo Seco, a river in central California, several times before.

This year, Curtis Whitson knew the water-fall was coming. He figured he would get out of his raft into the shallow water, get down the rocks along ropes on either side of the falls, and continue on his way, as he had on a previous trip.

But this year was different. Heavy snow and spring rains had turned the usually manageable falls into something fierce. And this year, instead of his friends, Whitson’s companions were his girlfriend, Krystal Ramirez, and his 13-year-old son, Hunter. As the three of them approached the falls late in the afternoon of the third day of their camping trip, Whitson could tell from the increasing roar of water in the narrowing canyon(峡谷) that they were in serious trouble. There was no way they’d be able to get down the rocks as planned.

“The water was just roaring through there with tremendous force,” recalls Whitson, 45.

They had no smart phone service, and they hadn’t seen a single person in the past three days. And Whitson knew that they’d be sharing the ground there with rattlesnakes and mountain lions.

As he was thinking what to do, Whitson hit on a bit of luck---he heard voices coming from the other side of the falls. He yelled, but the sound of the rushing water drowned him out.

“We have to get these people a message,” Whitson thought.

He grabbed a stick and pulled out his pocketknife to carve “Help” in it. Then he tied a rope to it so the people would know it wasn’t just any stick. He tried throwing it over the falls, but it floated away in the wrong direction.

“We’ve got to do something!” Whitson yelled to his son. “Have we got anything else?”

Then he spotted his water bottle. Whitson grabbed it and carved “Help!”on it. Ramirez also reminded him that he had a pen and paper in his backpack.

Whitson knew it was a slim hope. But he wrote “6-15 19:00 We are stuck here@ the waterfall. Get help please” and pushed the note into the bottle. This time, his throw over the waterfall was perfect.

“All right, that’s all we can do,” Whitson told Hunter.

It took 30 minutes to get back upstream to the beach where they’d had lunch.

The next morning, the helicopter returned.

It was a very hot afternoon. My friend Leah and I were waiting for the rush hour train. We were tired and couldn't wait to get back to the place where we were living.

When the train arrived, we got into the second carriage from the front. The air conditioning wasn't working at the rear （后部）, so the front was particularly crowded that day. I sat by the window admiring the changing landscape.

Suddenly we felt an enormous pressure pushing us backwards into our seats. The windows broke into tiny pieces and dust flew around violently. I could barely open my eyes.

The train was suffering from a crash, and it didn't feel as if it were going to stop. When it did, I thought, I would be dead. I thought about my husband Guy, who was supposed to receive the news first. I thought of my dear father and other family members , wondering how each would deal with my death.

Voices began to break through my thoughts. People were anxious. Strangely, I was totally calm. I wasn’t panicking; my heart wasn't even beating fast.

When the train finally stopped, we slowly stood up, pushing off the table that had fallen onto us; others stayed in their seats and many were injured and covered in blood. I could hear screaming. A soldier pushed the damaged door open for us to escape.

Our carriage had run out of rails and we were halfway home. We had a lot of blood on us and I searched my body for wounds, but I didn't find any. My knees felt painful and my hips were black and blue , and Leah had her hand cut when jumping off the train, but that wasn't serious.

Helicopters landed and we saw soldiers running in and out. All around us were ambulances （救护车） , and people lying on the ground. Everyone was shouting for help. I rang Guy, who was very calm and said he would come and get us. Seeing all these brought me great emotional hurt.

It was almost dark by the time we found Guy and he drove us home.

In the days that followed, I convinced myself I had internal bleeding.

9 . Surfer Dudes to the Rescue!

About 50 feet from shore of the Northern California’s Trinidad State Beach, two brothers were fighting for their lives. They had been swept out to sea in a rip current (激流), their mouths barely able to stay above the water. Thick fog made it difficult for beachgoers to see the guys, but the screams were unmistakable. And every second counted. The brothers, ages 15 and 20, were wearing shorts and T-shirts, unsuitable for a November day, let alone the freezing water. Keven Harder, a supervising ranger (巡查员), told the North Coast Journal in nearby Eureka that swimming in such a temperature “takes the fight right out of you.”

Luckily, four surfers in wet suits were nearby. Narayan Weibel, Spenser Stratton, and Adrian York, all 16, along with Taj Ortiz-Beck, 15, were on their surfboards riding up and down the coast on five-foot waves when they heard the cries. They turned and saw two bobbing heads and four struggling arms. “We looked at each other and knew these guys were about to drown,” Weibel told the Washington Post.

Weibel, Stratton, and Ortiz-Beck paddled toward the distressed swimmers while York headed to shore to warn someone to call 911. He then dived back in to help his friends.

As the surfers drew close, the brothers were still fighting hard for their lives. “It was pretty stressful, but there wasn’t any time to think about it, and that helped me keep my cool,” Ortiz-Beck says.

Ortiz-Beck pulled up alongside the younger brother. Grabbing him under his arms, he raised him up onto his board. Stratton and Weibel, meanwhile, hurried to help the older brother. He was large, 250 to 300 pounds, and he was panicked.

“I told them, ‘Calm down—we got you!’” says Weibel. “They thought they were going to die.”

York arrived in time to help get the older brother atop the second board. The surfers then paddled several minutes through choppy water to the medical help waiting onshore. The brothers were scared but fine.

“When we get a call like this one, it’s usually too late by the time we get there,” says Dillon Cleavenger, a first responder. “I can’t say enough about what these boys did. They were willing and prepared to risk their lives.”

10 . The sound that woke Damian Languell at 8:15 in the morning was so loud he assumed it came from inside his house in Wade, Maine. As he got up to investigate, he heard another sound, this one coming most definitely from outside. Looking out of his bedroom window, he noticed a tree enveloped in smoke about 500 yards away. A car wrapped around the tree's base, its engine on fire.

Grabbing buckets of water, he and his wife ran to the crash site. Up close, the accident looked worse. The car was split nearly in two, and the tree was where the driver's seat ought to have been, as if planted there. No one should have survived this crash, and yet there was 20- year-old Quintin Thompson, his terrified face pressed against the driver's side window, in visible pain.

Languell tried putting out the fire with his buckets of water but failed. When the flames got into the front seats, he knew he had to get the young man out. So Languell opened the car's back door and climbed in. Using a pocket knife he'd brought with him, he cut through Thompson's seat belt. Now that Thompson was free, Languell pulled him out, and dragged him to safety before the entire car was in flames.

It is empathy that drove Languell to help, just as he said, "My heart goes out to Thompson. When you are that close to that level of hurt, you feel it so directly." For his heroic action, Languell was added to the list of real-life heroes changing the world.